A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Publisher:

Bantam

Copyright:

October 1959

Printing:

October 1997

ISBN:

0-553-37926-7

Format:

Trade paperback

Pages:

338

I've heard many good things about this book. It tends to crop up in
favorite book discussions at conventions, people comment that it blew them
away, and it seems to evoke a lot of fond memories. I've been looking
forward to reading it for a while, and was hoping to like it far more than
I did.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is another post-apocalyptic novel, this
time starting some time after the apocalypse. Mankind has had its great
war, civilization was devastated, and in the aftermath a vicious backlash
on all form of science and, by extension, learning has left the world
nearly devoid of literacy or pre-war information. An order of Catholic
monks remains devoted to preserving knowledge, however, and maintains
stashes of pre-war information that they themselves largely don't
understand, protecting it in the hopes that it will be useful when man's
curiosity and capacity reassert themselves.

I don't really understand where Miller was trying to go with this book.
At the beginning, I was pretty sure it was intended to be dark humor; the
story of the bumbling and not terribly bright brother who rediscovers
ancient relics from before the war provoked a few chuckles. But then, the
middle section of the book, several hundred years later, seems to be
trying more for a straight story of the rediscovery of technology. And
then the final part, hundreds of years later still, went off in a
completely different direction towards a cautionary tale of man's mistakes
and a questioning of religion, euthanasia, and the value of life. Each of
these sections features very different characters, making it hard to build
up a lot of attachment to the protagonists.

The last two parts of the book are the strongest. I found the bumbling of
Brother Francis to be more annoying than amusing, and nothing really
happens in his section. My favorite parts of the book are the memorable
Dom Paulo, abbot when science finally begins to rise again, and the
remarkably blunt confrontation of the ethics of euthanasia in the last
section. I also liked the character of the Wandering Jew, who shows up
most notably in the first two parts to poke some pointed holes in
everyone's self-importance (although I wish more would have been done with
that subplot). But overall, I was left rather unsatisfied.

I've read several reviews of A Canticle for Leibowitz that say it
addresses fundamental questions about religion or technology, or that it
is a serious examination of the issues surrounding knowledge and power.
It does touch on those issues some (on euthanasia and the perils of
nuclear war more strongly and directly than on anything else), and the
book is riddled with Catholicism. However, this attention seems skin
deep, more liturgical Latin than Catholic philosophy, more inevitable
apocalypse than deep struggles over the nature of human power. Faith,
knowledge, power, and technology are present in form, but few questions
are asked about substance, let alone directly addressed. For a book
seriously tackling the question of how Catholic philosophy combines with
science fiction, I would read The
Sparrow instead.

It's a bad sign when you finish a book and are left wondering what the
point was in writing it. Nothing that the characters do in this book ends
up being particularly important or influential, and eventually the work of
the monks feels like an exercise in futility. There is some glimmer of
significance at the end, but far too late for it to be explored. The
characterization, while good, isn't enough to carry the book without help
from the plot, particularly since one doesn't get to follow a single
character through the whole book.

Miller isn't a bad writer, but the only reason why I'd recommend this one
is for its historical significance to the subgenre of post-apocalyptic
fiction.

Followed many years later by Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse
Woman, which was never published in Miller's lifetime.